This is 'as intended'. mpeg-2 native does no conversion of the file.. IT simply reads it off the network and decrypts it inline. This pretty much is a 'as fast as you can download it'. In order to remove commercials, the file has to be processed and re-encoded. Since mpeg-2 native doesn't re-encode, it can't remove commercials.

If you want an mpeg-2 stream without commercials, select one of the DVD mpeg-2 formats, which do re-encode.

Ok, just a warning though, comskip has been making really BAD mistakes for low-quality shows (I mean bitrate). So I recommend not using it on those or at least checking the results before using... med-quality to HD has been working fine I think.

I have a single tuner s2 with an hard drive upgrade so I record everything in high quality SD and it has worked fine for my tests. I have also tested some med-quality clips with success. It might clip a few frames here and there but nothing too annoying.

This is 'as intended'. mpeg-2 native does no conversion of the file.. IT simply reads it off the network and decrypts it inline. This pretty much is a 'as fast as you can download it'. In order to remove commercials, the file has to be processed and re-encoded. Since mpeg-2 native doesn't re-encode, it can't remove commercials.

If you want an mpeg-2 stream without commercials, select one of the DVD mpeg-2 formats, which do re-encode.

Yoav,
Thanks so much for the updates! Unfortunately, your solution only works for SD content, not HD mpeg2. It would be great to have an option that would download the mpeg2, then strip the commercials and output mpeg2 that is the same resolution as the source.

Yoav,
Thanks so much for the updates! Unfortunately, your solution only works for SD content, not HD mpeg2. It would be great to have an option that would download the mpeg2, then strip the commercials and output mpeg2 that is the same resolution as the source.

Ok shouldn't be too hard to add that. (Although it will have to be forced to a resolution (either 1920x1080 or 1200x720). In the meanwhile you can make edits to:

/Applications/iTiVo.app/Contents/Resources/re-encoder.pl

using any text editor. Then change DVD NTS to whatever resolution you want (in the scale option).

I plan on adding support for a user-configurable encoding options thing. Hopefully that will solve the many "can you add this mode..." queries..

I'll recap my problem from another thread and add an update here ...
"I've tried four times now to tansfer a movie\tv show and none of the will open in Quick Time, Final Cut Pro, etc. The last two errors were "The movie could not be opened. An invalid sample description was found in the movie".

I have plenty of free drive space. The setting are AppleTV, no comskip, the TV Show shows up as HD in the selection window, but it's off of the Comedy Channel (at best it's digital not HD). I tried iTivo 1.4 and the latest beta. I'm running Leopard 10.5.5.

Any idea what's going wrong? My ultimate goal is to take some of the shows off of my TivoHD (9.4) and move them over to my AppleTV for storage and longterm watching."

Update: If I select "iPhone" in preferences as the download format it encodes successfully, but "AppleTV" as the format is not successful an returns the error noted above. Is there something wrong with the AppleTV settings?

I'll recap my problem from another thread and add an update here ...
"I've tried four times now to tansfer a movie\tv show and none of the will open in Quick Time, Final Cut Pro, etc. The last two errors were "The movie could not be opened. An invalid sample description was found in the movie".

I have plenty of free drive space. The setting are AppleTV, no comskip, the TV Show shows up as HD in the selection window, but it's off of the Comedy Channel (at best it's digital not HD). I tried iTivo 1.4 and the latest beta. I'm running Leopard 10.5.5.

Any idea what's going wrong? My ultimate goal is to take some of the shows off of my TivoHD (9.4) and move them over to my AppleTV for storage and longterm watching."

at it encodes successfully, but "AppleTV" as the format is not successful an returns the error noted above. Is there something wrong with the AppleTV settings?

Multi-part answer (keep in mind I don't have an appletv to test with).

AppleTV setting does a bit-copy of the audio stream. From HD content that's entirely playable in quicktime, but from regular content quicktime doesn't know what to do.
I'll have it re-encode all audio to faac 5.1 irrelevant of the source I suppose.

Soemthing to keep in mind though. for regular TV you probably don't want to use AppleTV as your setting, since that tries to keep data at 1200x720 (which is bigger than your source)

An early Comedy Central program that I had trouble with transcoded with the original AppleTV setting just fine. I suspect that is because the original sound track was only 2 channel. When inspecting it's properties it states: MPEG-4, 274 kbps, Stereo, 3316 kbps, 960x720, H.264

An early Comedy Central program that I had trouble with transcoded with the original AppleTV setting just fine. I suspect that is because the original sound track was only 2 channel. When inspecting it's properties it states: MPEG-4, 274 kbps, Stereo, 3316 kbps, 960x720, H.264

Any ideas on what changes I need to make?

Thanks.
Mark.

I see two potential problems:

1) Your source is a 30 fps movie, and we arent converting it to 24 fps. So I guess we need to lower the max resolution to 960 x 540. Find the dsize=1200:720:0 chunk and change it to dsize=960:540:0 (in the video encoder options).

2) Your audio is probably still at 480 kbps (from the 6-channel encoding). In the audio encoding options, change br=480 to br=160

I'll recap my problem from another thread and add an update here ...
"I've tried four times now to tansfer a movie\tv show and none of the will open in Quick Time, Final Cut Pro, etc. The last two errors were "The movie could not be opened. An invalid sample description was found in the movie".

I have plenty of free drive space. The setting are AppleTV, no comskip, the TV Show shows up as HD in the selection window, but it's off of the Comedy Channel (at best it's digital not HD). I tried iTivo 1.4 and the latest beta. I'm running Leopard 10.5.5.

Any idea what's going wrong? My ultimate goal is to take some of the shows off of my TivoHD (9.4) and move them over to my AppleTV for storage and longterm watching."

Update: If I select "iPhone" in preferences as the download format it encodes successfully, but "AppleTV" as the format is not successful an returns the error noted above. Is there something wrong with the AppleTV settings?

I just got the same error message last night. Interested to hear what you find as they all transferred flawlessly but couldn't play when i double click the movie in finder. I just picked the Apple TV setting.

1) Your source is a 30 fps movie, and we arent converting it to 24 fps. So I guess we need to lower the max resolution to 960 x 540. Find the dsize=1200:720:0 chunk and change it to dsize=960:540:0 (in the video encoder options).

2) Your audio is probably still at 480 kbps (from the 6-channel encoding). In the audio encoding options, change br=480 to br=160

<crossing fingers and hoping we got it this time>. Again tell me

Made the changes you suggested but still not luck in Mudville. It'll import into iTunes and play in iTunes and QuickTime but will not transfer over to AppleTV. Same error message "because it can not be played on this AppleTV"